Throughout the tremendous grind that is the minor league season, players experience the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Hitters go on streaks where every ball they hit seems to find a gap, then two weeks later they look overmatched and overwhelmed at the plate. A pitcher might have his best stuff for a month’s worth of starts, then find that his breaking ball isn’t breaking the way it had been and his fastball isn’t blowing by hitters like it was before.
The great separator, however, between those that do and don’t reach the game’s highest level is the ability to prevent those rough couple of weeks from turning into months and entire seasons.
The trio below put together promising August/Septembers in 2018 that they’ll look to carry over into 2019.
LHP David Peterson
Peterson’s first full season as a professional got off to a slow start, opening on the injured, née disabled list with a cranky knee. Once healthy, he headed to Low-A Columbia and was dominant to the point where it was really questionable whether he should have been there in the first place. Following a nine-hit, five-run outing in his second start, Peterson rattled off a string of seven appearances spanning 47.2 innings where he posted a 1.13 ERA, held hitters to a .198 average, and struck out a remarkable 6.25 batters for every walk.
He was promoted to St. Lucie at that point and responded by hitting the proverbial wall. While he was still excellent at keeping the ball in the park and was perhaps the victim of some bad luck (note: the St. Lucie defense was awful last season), Peterson’s first eight starts resulted in a 7.03 ERA with 58 hits allowed in 39.2 innings.
His final five outings, however, were a different story. With his footing at the level secured, Peterson allowed just two earned runs in 29.0 innings and held hitters to a measly .369 OPS. While scouts talk up the fact that he doesn’t own frontline, swing-and-miss stuff, Peterson was adept at missing bats in 2018: 83% of his 115 strikeouts came on whiffs, with the league average around 74%.
While most organizations would have had their 2017 first-round starter from a power conference reach Double-A by the end of 2018, Peterson is facing an adjustment period in Binghamton over the first month or so of the upcoming season. His pitchability and makeup, however, don’t lend to a belief that any rough stretches will be prolonged.
OF Hansel Moreno
Moreno’s 2018 season did not go the way anyone expected — in a positive way. Scheduled to open with Brooklyn in June, he was summoned to Columbia when Walter Rasquin went down with a broken finger. Still physically immature and having yet to tap into the raw tools that created rumblings out of the complexes, expectations were up in the air.
The initial results were rough. Moreno struck out 31 times in his first 81 plate appearances, but he wasn’t heading back down to Brooklyn in June. Rasquin had been suspended so Moreno stayed and became a semi-regular. His showed marked improvement in June, hitting .321 and slashing his K rate by over 13 points.
Moreno hit a July swoon, but he made some small tweaks to his stance and approach and finished the year on a high note. In August, he hit five home runs (more than any prior total season) and nearly matched his year-to-date extra-base hit total. He added 12 stolen bases to finish the season with 21 — tied for the second-highest mark in the system.
Moreno has more clarity on where he’ll spend the 2019 season: High-A St. Lucie. He focused primarily on playing the outfield during spring training, a position he has had limited exposure to, and should be in the lineup every day, wherever he can be plugged in. The potential outcomes for his season range from a guy who gets everything to click and is in Double-A by the end of the year to looking lost in A ball staring down minor league free agency after 2020.
OF/1B Matt Winaker
No minor league hitter in the organization was hotter than Winaker in August of 2018. That includes Pete Alonso, who, for perspective, had his best month of the season at the same time. Winaker led the system with a .443 wOBA in 110 plate appearances following a still solid .341 mark in June and July.
Winaker’s power took off, too. He more than doubled his year-to-date total with seven home runs in August and placed in the 94th percentile in HR/PA% among full-season hitters (min. 100 PA in the month). He isn’t a particularly large dude, but he puts considerable loft on the ball and has enough strength to turn on a fastball and wait back on the breaking ball.
The Mets signed their fair share of college hitters in the 2016 and 2017 drafts, and while some have already panned out (Alonso) and others have been quick to flame out, Winaker falls somewhere in between. It’s possible that he tears through the middle levels and turns into what Jeff McNeil is now, or goes the way of Gene Cone, Carl Stajduhar, Colby Woodmansee…
Most likely, Winaker is a safe bet to at least settle in as a Triple-A regular. He won’t get much further than A ball, however, if he continues to struggle in the outfield (where he was worth an impressively bad -17.4 runs above average, literally 334th out of 334 in the South Atlantic League). He was working at first base, where he played in 2017 and throughout college, during spring training, but it remains to be seen how many reps he’ll get during the season, with Jeremy Vasquez heading back to man the position in St. Lucie.
